[GNC-dev] book currency is what ... question mark

[Alex Aycinena]

>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us>
> To: Wm <wm_o_o_o at yahoo.co.uk>
> Cc: gnucash-devel at lists.gnucash.org
> Bcc:
> Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2019 20:48:53 -0800
> Subject: Re: [GNC-dev] book currency is what ... question mark
>
>
> > On Feb 11, 2019, at 6:49 PM, Wm via gnucash-devel <
> gnucash-devel at gnucash.org> wrote:
> >
> > at the risk of appearing to be an imperialist, what is "book currency" ?
> >
> > I think of "home currency" as whatever currency most people close to you
> (the reader) use to buy and sell ordinary stuff like carbohydrate staples
> (rice, bread, etc) and water
> >
> > in the UK that is GBP, in the USA it is USD, in most of Europe it is
> EUR, in other places, depending on government, it might be something else.
> >
> > my point is, unless your government is failing, you should be able to
> use the same currency for your home currency and your bookkeeping.
> >
> > presuming I haven't gone insane yet, does anyone know what a "book
> currency" is?
> >
> > If someone really wanted to run a set of accounts in another currency
> gnc isn't stopping them, the underlying transaction stream works perfectly
> regardless.
>
> Book currency is the currency of the book's root account, which you set
> when you created the book. For nearly everyone it is indeed their home
> currency, but that's immaterial to GnuCash.
>
> Suppose, though, that while your book currency is GBP, you have accounts
> in EUR and RUB and you do a transaction between those two. The transaction
> will set the transaction currency to the account whose register you use to
> create it and will balance the transaction in that currency: If you start
> in the RUB account then it will convert the EUR amount to a RUB value and
> check that the credit and debit values are equal.
>
>  What Alex is working on is to instead use the book currency for
> balancing: GnuCash would in this example convert both RUB and EUR amounts
> to GBP values and balance the transaction in GBP. It's an interesting idea
> but I suspect that it will be very difficult to get right, a suspicion at
> least somewhat borne out by the fact that Alex has been working at it for
> at least 3 years.
>
> Regards,
> John Ralls
>
>
John - what you are saying is absolutely correct except for the part about
working on it for three years. I did start it a while ago, but then other
commitments have prevented me from working on it at all for a couple of
years. The part you describe above will not be hard since the logic already
exists; the integrated lot tracking, though, will be harder. I will shortly
be able to get back to it though. Alex